1. Field of Invention
The invention relates to the field of voice telephony communications, specifically the fields of retail and wholesale voice telecommunications. More particularly, the invention relates to the field of real-time call routing.
2. Background of the Invention
The current state of knowledge is as follows.
Today, many telecommunications termination providers are averse to having too much (if any at all) dialer traffic. Dialer traffic is usually generated by an auto dialer, which is an electronic device or software that is capable of automatically dialing large numbers of simultaneous phone calls. Once the call has been answered, the auto dialer either plays a recorded message or connects the call to a live person. When an auto dialer plays a pre-recorded message, it's often called “voice broadcasting”, or “robocalling”. Some voice broadcasting messages ask the person who answers to press a button on their phone keypad, such as in opinion polls in which recipients are asked to press one digit if they support one side of an issue, or another digit if they support the other side. This type of call is often called “outbound interactive voice response”. When an auto dialer connects an answered call to a live agent, it is often called a “predictive dialer” or “power dialer”. A predictive dialer uses real-time analysis to determine the optimal time to dial more numbers, whereas a power dialer simply dials a preset number of lines when an agent finishes the previous call.
Thus, the call characteristics of dialer traffic are highly peaked (hundreds or thousands of calls per second), short ALOC (average length of calls), and low completion rates. This negatively impacts the telecommunications infrastructure, as high call attempts congest both traditional and VoIP networks. Thus, the telecommunications network elements are saturated with low or no revenue calls, supplanting conversational calls which have higher revenue and higher call completion rate. Since each call does not have typical duration and are often unanswered, the termination provider does not generate acceptable revenue, as call setup time is non-billable, dead time. The negative cost impact increased in early 2009, when downstream tier one providers began charging additional surcharges and penalties if the ALOC was too short, and/or if a high percentage of calls do not complete.
Currently, most termination providers have no desire to accept dialer traffic. So when choosing a terminating provider, (“SPs”) are tasked with understanding the additional surcharge layer of dialer traffic as well as continuously monitoring their traffic in order to avoid these fees.